Excerpt from New York Literary Lights

from the "Introduction"

The Present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost. John Jay Chapman

Native son Chapman saw in New York City what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus divined to be the case, that change alone is constant and life's only certainty. Today New York City, Manhattan in particular but the other four boroughs, the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn as well, embodies this perception.

This has not always been so. The city, founded as New Amsterdam six years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, developed slowly. As you will see it did not become the first city in America until late in the nineteenth century and became a capital of the world, the "Imperial City," only after World War II.

But beginning on some impossible-to-determine day as early, perhaps, as the 1840s, New York City achieved a rhythm that pulses in it this very minute. All that natives or visitors need do is step onto a city sidewalk and they feel it, relentless and exhilarating. It is the rhythm of unceasing change.

Since New York never stand still, this means that the city of the 1980s, of Yuppies, arbitrageurs, Michael Milken and Jay MacInerney's novel Bright Lights, Big City is as long gone as Frank O'Hara's city of the 1950s, Ralph Ellison's of the 1940s and back to the Old New York of Edith Wharton and before her to that of the first great New York writer, Walt Whitman.

As the first fact about the city, change has dictated the arrangement of this book. Those who wish to encounter Whitman's New York cannot do so by visiting Pfaff's, the saloon he frequented, nor can they go the 5 Spot where Frank O'Hara "leaned on the john door" listening to Billie Holiday. To walk the downtown streets where these places once stood, readers need a degree of information to orient and prime their imaginations. Thus, this book opens with a short essay that presents the big picture, the broad flow of New York City literary life from the city's beginnings as a Dutch colony to yesterday. This essay also sketches the growth of the city from trading post to metropolis.

Following this comes, in effect, an encyclopedia. A to Z, Auchincloss to Zukofsky, covering not only New York City's writers but publishers, agents, magazines, bookstores, libraries, neighborhoods, institutions from the American Academy of Arts and Letters on 156th Street to the Poetry Project at St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie, and a miscellany of other information that will enlarge the reader's sense of what creates literary life in the city.

In writing these entries I have followed the principle of honoring the past while serving the present and near present. A book like this ought to speak no only to but for its time. Condemn the canon as we might, history will decide what in the past fifty or seventy-five years is of lasting importance. Here and now we know that the literary life of a great city comes out of a congeries of forces and attitudes and not out of caring about what is or will last. Oh, we may care or say we do about the eternal, but we cannot really know what will endure, so why start keeping a list? The aim of this book is to inform and delight, and this can best be done by setting the table for a banquet. Readers of this book will already have some idea where he wants to start.

Copyright 1998 by William Corbett. All rights reserved.